Never Trust A Lady

Chapter 6

She halted as if the wall itself had suddenly shifted to block her path, while her heartbeat stumbled and then lurched on, like a drunk running downhill.

Tom Hawkins. Yes, it was-and she’d have known him at once in spite of the old, worn-looking bomber jacket, baseball cap and aviator sunglasses he was wearing, and the oddly out-of-place briefcase he was carrying, if it hadn’t been for the grief that seemed to weigh him down like an invisible net.

For a few moments she stood motionless, in shock not so much at seeing him Here-she was beginning to half expect him to turn up “coincidentally” wherever she happened to be-or even at the giddy lift she’d felt beneath her ribs at the moment of recognition. But seeing him like this. Hurt and suffering, and so dreadfully vulnerable. It seemed almost indecent that she should see him like this, like surprising a stranger in the shower.

And yet it was her nature to comfort and nurture, and the urge to go to him and offer what solace she could was all but overwhelming. Or…maybe after all it would be better if she just turned and walked away and left him his privacy and solitude.

How long she stood there in breathless indecision she didn’t know, but in the end he looked up and saw her, and the choice wasn’t hers to make.

“Well,” he said in a cracked-sounding voice, “we meet again.”

Jane mumbled something equally inane and was rewarded with his crooked smile, which seemed to her even more heartbreakingly poignant than usual in that context.

“Are you-” he gestured toward the scrap of paper on which she’d written down the coordinates for Jimmy’s name “-looking for someone?”

“What? Oh, well, yes, sort of. Just a…” The guilt flooded her, filling her cheeks with warmth. She shook her head, erasing that self-conscious denigration, and said firmly, “A friend. He’s officially MIA.”

“His name’ll be here,” Tom said, his tone dry, the curve of his lips becoming even more ironic. “It’ll just have a little cross after it.”

“Yes, that’s what… And then, I guess, if they’re ever found, they just chip out the rest.” Jane watched her finger trace the diamond after a name and was astonished that her hand could appear so steady when she felt so jangled inside.

With that same soft irony, Tom drawled, “I don’t think they’re gonna be doing much more of that, do you?”

Uncertain what he meant, Jane glanced at him, but was unable to see anything at all of his eyes, just her own reflection in the sunglasses. She looked away again, down at the paper in her hand, and muttered distractedly, “I think…it should be somewhere near here.”

They weren’t the words she’d meant to say. Where were those words, the words of motherly comfort and sympathy she’d meant to offer a wounded and grieving stranger? They seemed impossible to utter now. He didn’t seem at all wounded, and she felt not the least bit maternal. What she felt most like was a girt-a very young girl, shy and awkward and out of her depth.

He took the paper from her, slipping it from between her nerveless fingers, asking permission with a quirk of his eyebrows. Silently she watched him as he moved along the walkway, scanning the list of names. She could see him reflected in the polished granite, along with the other visitors, a small V of American flags and the Washington Monument.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a spot about two feet from the base of the wall. “Is that the one?”

Jane nodded. Lowering herself to one knee, she slowly traced the letters with her fingertips. James P. Hill. And then the cross.

From behind her, his voice came, dry as the sands that blew day and night across the California deserts of her childhood. “Was he somebody close to you?”

She looked up, startled by the gruffness and by the unmistakable compassion in the voice, to find a face as unreadable as stone, the lenses of the sunglasses that gazed back at her as opaque as the face of the wall itself.

She shook her head, surprised to find that her throat was tight, and that for those few moments, at least, the denial she was about to utter was a lie. “No,” she murmured. “Just somebody I went to school with. A long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you remember his face.” Tom’s smile twitched off center as he held out his hand to help her up.

He saw it come, then, that lighting deep in her eyes, that little flare of gladness and recognition.

“Yes-yes, I do. How did you know?”

He shrugged and felt her hand warm his as he steadied her to her feet. The sun struck reddish highlights into her dark hair and tipped her lashes with gold. For the first time he noticed the faded ghosts of freckles across the tops of her cheeks and on the bridge of her nose.

She took a deep breath as she brushed off her slacks and looked sort of sideways at him, and he knew it was coming. He braced himself, but she said it so softly, so gently, that the question didn’t seem an assault at all. “And you…the name you were touching…he was someone close to you?”

He tried to take some of the pressure off his chest by releasing air in a short little laugh. It didn’t help much, and neither did the deep breath that followed. “Yeah, you could say that,” he said finally, focusing his gaze somewhere above her head, on the white puffy clouds racing across the blue spring sky. How had it got to be so beautiful, he wondered irrelevantly, after such a crappy day yesterday?

“A friend?” she persisted. “Or…”

“My father.”

“Oh. Oh dear, I’m so sorry.”

He could see that she was startled, that it was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. He didn’t know if it was that or the genuine compassion in her eyes that made him explain, in a drawl that tried hard to be casual. “Yeah, he was a naval aviator-a commander at the time of his death, promoted posthumously to captain, which I guess made a difference to someone-my mother, maybe. He was stationed on a carrier in the South China Sea. Flew one too many missions, I guess you could say. And…” he could feel his face cramp with his attempt at a smile as he touched the name he’d located for her, and the MIA cross that followed it “…I guess you could say we were one of the lucky ones. We got a body to bury- It’s over there-” he made a gesture with his hand “-in Arlington.”

He could feel her eyes on him, hear even the tiny throat-clearing sound she made before she said, “That must have been very hard for you.” And then, again so gently he didn’t even notice that she was chip-chipping away at his carefully constructed barricades, “How old were you when it happened?”

And again he was mildly surprised when he heard himself answer. “I was sixteen.”

“A difficult.age.”

He shrugged. “I guess. It was for me, anyway.”

They were strolling along the paved walkway now, close together but nowhere near touching. In spite of that, he was aware of everything about her, the clothes she wore-same slacks and blazer as yesterday, but a different turtleneck, teal blue this time-every movement she made, no matter how slight. Aware that once again she’d turned her head to look at him. He wondered what she saw when she gazed at him like that, so thoughtful and silent. Wondered why it made him so uneasy. And why he allowed it.

“I was pretty difficult at all ages, if you want to know the truth,” he said, taking a breath. “My dad was gone a lot, and I didn’t get along with my mom. Hell, nobody did-including my dad, which was probably why he was gone a lot.” He glanced sideways at Jane to see if she’d smiled at his poor attempt at humor, and was inordinately pleased to see the laugh lines deepening at the corners of her mouth and eyes. He found himself relaxing, at ease with her in a way he couldn’t remember being with anyone in many, many years.

“Anyway, I was already mad at my dad for going to ‘Nam-he’d volunteered for the duty, he didn’t have to go. And I was mad at my mother, blaming her for making him so miserable he’d rather be in that hellhole than home with his family. After he was shot down, well…I was one pretty angry, messed-up kid. Truth is, I don’t know what might have happened if it hadn’t been for-” He stopped, quivering with shock at what he’d almost said.

She glanced at him and, instead of pursuing it, asked, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“A brother.” He said it on an exhalation, relaxing again, with a chuckle that was more fond than ironic. “Jack. He’s navy, too, a real chip off the old block-lives somewhere in Texas, at the moment. Has a wife and three…no, four kids.” His mouth twisted in a way that was familiar to him; afraid of what his companion might read in that expression, he looked over at her and turned it into a grin. “As you’ve probably gathered, we don’t see a lot of each other.”

For a moment, those thoughtful, compassionate eyes seemed to bore right into his, though he knew they were safely hidden behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. But she didn’t say anything, and he shrugged and went on, “Jack was pretty much the only one who could get along with Mother, so of course he always took her side. He was at the academy when Dad died. Naturally he came right home-we were living here in Washington then. And needless to say, that didn’t help my attitude any. Like I said, I don’t know what I would have done…” he took a deep breath and this time let himself finish it “…if it hadn’t been for…a friend of mine.”

“A friend?” The prompt was so soft it seemed almost to come from inside his own mind.

He nodded. She’s good, he thought; really good. She could dig the life story out of a stone. “Their house backed up to ours. She was…I guess you could say she was my best friend.”

My best friend. How odd it was to hear the words, not like anything that might have come from him, but like the vibrations of chords played by some unseen musician and left hanging in the cool, winy air. He paused for a moment to listen, thinking that if he only listened hard enough…

“It’s good that you had someone,” Jane said gently. So much pain, she thought, watching his averted profile, the strange, almost expectant tilt of his head. So much grief…but not all, I think, for his father.

She said nothing more, but settled onto a vacant bench with a little sigh and pulled her tote bag into her lap, leaving it to him whether to tell her about the friend whose name he couldn’t bring himself to utter.

But he swore suddenly and threw her a hard, fierce look, the one men use to mask extreme emotions. “Ah, hell, what am I telling you all this stuff for?” Only he didn’t say “stuff,” and he didn’t apologize for the word he did use.

Jane just smiled; she used the word herself, on occasion. She said comfortably, “I expect because I’m a good listener.”

Watching him take cigarettes from a pocket inside his jacket with jerky, impatient motions, tap one out and light it, she found herself noticing the way his throat moved, the way his lips shaped themselves around the filter, the hard, brown look of his hands. Only when he’d tucked the pack away again and was blowing a thin stream of smoke into the morning’s brilliance did she realize that her mouth had gone dry.

She swallowed with an effort and asked, “Was this one of your appointments?”

“What?”

“Last night, you said-”

“Oh. Yeah, sort of.” The smile flicked briefly at one corner of his mouth but never made it as far as his eyes. He made a restless gesture with the hand that held the cigarette, then sat rather abruptly on the bench beside her, tucking his briefcase carefully between his feet. Also taking care, she noticed, to hold the cigarette between his knees so the smoke wouldn’t drift her way.

Her heart gave a skip when he did that. It’s the little things, she thought. That’s what makes it so hard to explain when somebody asks, “Why? What is it about him?”

“I should be asking about you,” he said after a moment, turning toward her so that once again she couldn’t see anything of his eyes except the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “How are you this morning?” She shrugged and tried a smile, which he didn’t return. “Sleep okay?”

She shook her head, but of course she couldn’t tell him why she hadn’t been able to steep. And as she tried to efface it by adding, “I never do, really, in hotels,” she looked away, reluctant to have him see the doubt that must be in her eyes.

I wish, I really do wish I could trust him, she thought. This morning, seeing him there at The Wall like that, it was hard to remember why she couldn’t. Surely the grief had been genuine.

But, she reminded herself, villains have fathers, too.

“No more dizziness?”

“What?” She jerked her head around to look at him again, heart thumping. His arm lay across the back of the bench behind her shoulders; it was the feathery touch of his fingers. on her neck that had startled her so. “Oh-no.” Her swallow made a stickery sound. She laughed and made a dismissive gesture toward her own throat. “No, I’m perfectly fine. It didn’t even leave a mark, whatever he did. I’d have thought being almost strangled would have more of an effect, you know?”

“You weren’t strangled.” His hand dropped casually, almost negligently, to her nape; his thumb traced up and down the side of her throat.

“No?” Jane whispered. His hand was heavy and warm; she had to resist an urge to lean her head back against it. What is he doing? What does this mean?

He shook his head. Without the influence of his eyes, his smile had an almost unbearable sweetness. “It wasn’t your air supply that was cut off.”

She tried desperately to look intelligent. “It wasn’t?”

Another head shake. “See, if you press right here…” He did so, gently, and instantly she felt that awful, remembered pressure. “What you do is, you cut off the blood supply to the brain.”

Jane gasped and pulled away from him, heart thumping. “But that’s…” She could hardly get the words out; she felt cold. But of course, she thought, being a policeman, he’d know about things like that. “So I could have…he really could have killed me.”

“Could have. But didn’t.”

He took his arm away from the back of the bench, leaving her feeling unsettled, as though someone had picked her up, shaken her vigorously and then set her down again slightly askew.

Gesturing at the tote bag in her lap, he casually asked, “Had it appraised yet?”

She gave her head a quick, hard shake, more in an effort to set herself to rights than as a response to the question, and shifted the tote bag unnecessarily as she considered how she should reply.

It wasn’t that she feared Tom Hawkins; she didn’t, not anymore. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t make him out to be a villain. And not only because he’d said he was a policeman, either. Because neither did the fact that he was a policeman mean she trusted him. Cop or villain, she was quite certain he wasn’t being honest with her. She could just feel it. He had some sort of agenda he wasn’t telling her about, which struck her as being particularly unfair of him since she seemed to be involved in whatever was going on, at least indirectly.

For goodness’ sake, she thought in exasperation, if he was some kind of law enforcement officer, why didn’t he just show her his ID and tell her what was going on? Why all this cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse stuff? It was all beginning to seem like some sort of elaborate game, and she was quite frankly fed up with being the only one who didn’t know the rules!

On the other hand, someone had broken into her hotel room last night and attacked her. That was no game.

She took a deep breath and released it. “I was going to. But then I saw that man again-Aaron Campbell-the one from the auction? He was on the Metro, on the next car. And he got off when I did. I’m almost sure he was following me. At least…” She let her words trail off into uncertainty, exasperated with herself now. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything, that was the problem.

Tom took a final drag on his cigarette. “Campbell again, huh?” he said on a soft hiss of expelled smoke.

Jane shot him a look and said flatly, “You think it was him last night, don’t you? In my hotel room.”

He shrugged and dropped the cigarette onto the packed, moist earth at his feet. “I told you, he had on-”

“-a ski mask. I know, I know.” Furious with the evasion, she lapsed into silence.

“Look, just to be on the safe side, would you like me to go with you? I could take you…”

Why do I have a feeling you’re going to anyway, whether I say yes or not? Jane thought resentfully. She said with a slight smile, “Take me…to your friend at the Smithsonian?” and was more satisfied than surprised when he looked momentarily nonplussed. So he had been lying about that, too.

“Uh, I guess we could still do that,” he hedged as he tugged back the sleeve of the brown leather jacket and frowned at his watch. “I don’t know if he’d be in or not, but we could give it a try.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Jane said gently, “but thank you for the offer.” After a quick look around, she added briskly, “In any case, I seem to have ditched Mr. Campbell-if he was following me at all. Maybe it was just my imagination.”

Except for the faint sigh of an exhalation, there was no reply. But her awareness of Tom’s silence seemed to grow with each of her heartbeats, like the ticking of a clock in the wee hours of the morning. His presence seemed to swell, too, taking up more than his share of the bench, filling up all the space between them. She could feel his body’s heat, the sleeve of the old bomber jacket like melted butter against her arm. She could feel the warmth spreading to her face and throat, and down into her chest…her breasts.

And then…

“You don’t trust me, do you, Mrs. Carlysle?” It was spoken quietly for so blunt and unexpected a question, almost in a murmur.

She shook her head, not smiling at all now, nor looking at him, either, focusing instead on the knuckles of her hands where they gripped the handles of her tote bag. “You do seem to keep turning up, Mr. Hawkins. Everywhere Campbell is, everywhere I am…there you are. You must admit, it’s quite a coincidence.”

There was a sharp bark of laughter, and then more of that strange, pulsating silence. Jane’s mouth grew dry and her chest tight before he stirred and said in that same caressing voice, “What would you say if I told you you were right-that it wasn’t a coincidence, that I have an ulterior motive for… turning up, as you put it?”

Jane smiled. I’d say you were telling me the truth for a change. She turned to him, but the words never made it past her lips. He’d taken off his sunglasses finally, and the message in his eyes was crystal clear.

Here it comes. Hawk watched her eyes for the expected flare of awareness and surprise. He’d caught the shocked little bump in her breathing. All’s fair, he reminded himself when his belly tightened with guilt and self-disgust. If seduction is what it takes…

And then, to his great shock, she laughed. Without malice or artifice, just a warm little ripple of pure amusement, her eyes sparkling with it, crinkling up at the corners in that way he liked so much. He hadn’t thought it possible for so small and innocent a thing to have such an effect on him. It hit him in places he hadn’t known he still possessed-guy-places like ego, and pride, and others even more deeply buried and longer dormant that he couldn’t bear to give names to.

Detachment, his greatest defense, enfolded him in a shell of ice. It enabled him to coolly arch his eyebrows and inquire, “Why is that funny?”

She shook her head, still chuckling, and looked down at her hands. But Hawk had noted a faint blush of color in her cheeks, the slightest tremor of her lips. Now he zeroed in on them and unleashed his imagination. It didn’t take much. Good old reliable lust.

He concentrated on the shape and texture of her lips, until he could feel the heat of her mouth and taste her essence on his tongue. He thought about her hands, too…thought about those nice, strong, no-nonsense hands unbuckling his belt and peeling off his pants, encircling him, stroking him to that edge-of-explosion readiness. He called up the memory that had haunted him in the night, of that nice, firm fanny of hers pressed up against him, her breasts tumescent in his hands…

“You’re a very attractive woman,” he said, noting the sultry timbre of his own voice with detached satisfaction. “Don’t you know that?”

She lifted amused eyes to his. “Oh, please, Mr. Hawkins, I know perfectly well what I am. And who I am.”

Hawk shifted uncomfortably and muttered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He was beginning to feel just a little lost, as if he’d suddenly found himself in a foreign country, with unfamiliar language and customs; the woman’s responses weren’t what he’d expected and not at all what he was used to. Plus, the pounding in his belly and the intense heat in his loins was making him wonder if he should have been more careful about giving his libido free rein, considering how long it had been since he’d had a woman.

“I mean,” she began, and then paused, head tilted to one side, while she thought about it. Watching her, Hawk saw the flush in her cheeks deepen, caught the flicker of a pulse beat in her throat and felt a primitive surge of triumph at the realization that she wasn’t as immune to him-or his comments-as she wanted him to think she was. She drew a deep breath, and he felt his own pulse thumping against his breastbone.

“I’m hardly the femme fatale type,” she went on finally, speaking in a low, husky voice, and this time when she looked him in the eyes, although she was still gently smiling, he had the impression it wasn’t easy for her. Her vulnerability made him feel thoroughly ashamed of himself. “Certainly not the type of woman attractive and dashing strangers make passes at in the middle of a public park in broad daytight. I’m sorry-I don’t mean to be rude-but those things just don’t happen, except in movies and romance novels, I suppose. At least not to me.” She shifted to face forward again, giving the words a note of finality, like a sentence from a merciless judge.

In the silence that followed. Hawk realized that his jaw was aching from the tension of his tightly clenched teeth. And that his hands itched with the sudden urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her out of that damn composure of hers, shake her until her head fell back and her mouth opened and her breath came quick and shallow, and then… “You’re wrong, you know,” he growled.

She shook her head, implacable and yet serene. “I don’t think so.”

“What would I have to do to convince you?” he asked, masking his frustration with a smile he knew must look as crooked as his motives. “Kiss you?” It would serve her right…serve her right! “Right here and now? In broad daylight… in a public park?”

She looked at him and, with that maddening serenity, replied, “Probably.” Calling his bluff-he couldn’t believe it.

It would serve her right, he raged silently. Do it. Do it now. He thought about her lips crushing under the onslaught of his, her mouth opening…the clashing of teeth, the mating of tongues…her hands raking his back, her breath sobbing in her throat… Do it!

Sudden, unexpected desire curled inside him like tongues of flame, twisting his belly into knots, pounding in his temples. He felt almost sick with wanting… Do it now.

He almost did. He even reached out his hand to touch her, to take her chin and turn her to face him, to tilt her mouth to his pleasure. But then, for some reason, his lust-fogged gaze happened to focus on the little fan of crow’s-feet at the corner of her eye. And he thought, Nice….

And just like that the fog cleared, and he was rational again. But not detached. Hardly. Shaken. Shaken to his core.

She turned to look at him when he put on his shades-and a damn good thing she hadn’t done so before, he thought, or no telling what she’d have seen in his eyes, and he’d have lost her for good, for sure-fixing him with a look more rueful than amused. Perhaps even, he thought, with a touch of regret.

“You see,” she said softly, “I was right, wasn’t I?”

He gave a short laugh, a sound like sandpaper scraping over stone. Hearing it, her lips smiled without changing her eyes, and she reached up to touch his face along the hard, raspy edge of his jaw. “For some reason, I think…you’re too honorable to lie about such an important thing.”

With a movement like a snake striking, he caught her hand and imprisoned it in his grasp, holding it like a captured bird in the space between his face and hers. Looking across it, he caught and held her eyes, as well, knowing his were safely hidden now behind the hunter’s blind of his sunglasses.

Still vibrating and reckless from the effects of his brush with disaster, he said roughly, “About kissing you? Who said I was lying? Lady, you misjudge me. I do want very much to kiss you.” He was surprised to find that he meant it. Surprised, too, by that same primitive something in him that surged at the flicker of uncertainty-even alarm, and yes, desire, too!-he saw in the bottomless depths of her eyes. “Just not here, in broad daylight in a public park, as you put it. That’s not my. style. When I kiss you…” he smiled at the almost imperceptible jerk of response he felt in her hand “… when I kiss you, I’d want it to be private enough for what comes after. You follow me?”

He didn’t wait for her nod; the small, convulsive movement of her throat, the slight parting of her lips and the shine of perspiration across the tops of her cheekbones were enough for him.

Changing the nature of his grip on her hand, and with it the mood and tenor of what was between them, so that even he wasn’t sure now that the sexually charged moments had really happened, he rose and pulled her to her feet.

In a different voice, a light, teasing voice, he said, “And now that we’ve established that we both think the other is attractive…” He paused to smile at her gasp of protest. “You did, you know. You said attractive-and dashing. I have a very good memory.”

He was delighted by the grace with which she accepted his words, like a shifting of gears, or the change in tempo that signals a new movement in a symphony. Turning her hand in his so that it was more like, and more than, a handshake, she said sweetly, “Well, don’t let it go to your head, Mr. Hawkins. I also happen to think the bald guy in the Maytag commercials is adorable.”

Hawk grinned and touched his temple with two fingers in an unspoken touché. The heat was ebbing slowly from his body, leaving his mind clear and once more focused on the game at hand. And already plotting strategy several moves ahead.

“So,” he said as he bent to retrieve the briefcase from under the bench, breaking the vibrating silence that was threatening the tenuous truce between them, “you’ll be heading off to Georgetown, I suppose?”

There was no answer from Jane. Straightening, he saw that she was standing just where he’d left her, gnawing thoughtfully at her lip. He smiled to himself. Was she having second thoughts about turning him down, or thinking over the promise he’d just made to her? Both, probably. And if he were to ask again right now to accompany‘her to Georgetown, he wondered which of her fears would win.

He didn’t ask, having already decided that the trek to Georgetown on foot would give Campbell-not to mention any other players he might have missed-too many opportunities to play his hand. Hawk wanted Campbell completely out of the picture, if at all possible; dealing with this Carlysle woman was becoming complicated enough one on one. He didn’t even want to think about how complicated. So he said instead, with just a hint of exasperation, “Will you at least let me put you in a cab?”

He watched her eyes flare bright with relief. “Oh, yes, I’d appreciate that very much. Thank you.”

“There used to be a cab stand on Constitution, not far from here. Come on, I’ll walk you over.” He touched her elbow briefly and they set out together across the grass, taking a shortcut through the trees.

As they walked, briskly and in silence, not touching…with the part of his mind that wasn’t busy scanning and monitoring everything around him, Hawk found himself wondering, for the first time in many years, what the woman beside him was thinking.